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DIY Pennant Banner

Owen’s birthday is in 2 months, so today I finally started working on some birthday party planning! We have known for awhile that we want to do a Lorax themed party, which makes picking out the decorations, plates, and whatnots needed for the party pretty straight forward. The Lorax is a furry bright orange talking animal thing, with a bright yellow mustache. So the main colors are orange and yellow. If you have ever seen the movie its actually really visually stimulating, bright awesome colors throughout the whole thing.

But anyways, in my search to buy already made decorations I found that pricing is ridiculous, not to mention I couldn’t find anything in store that fit my color scheme. A plain solid orange pennant banner is $3.00 plus tax from Party City. That is boring… No thank you. Custom pennant banners from Etsy.com are anywhere from $8.00 to $25.00+! Okay, no.

Well, at Micheal’s they have open stock paper (1’x1′) for a quarter a sheet in every color and design EVER. I went with that. I bought 8 sheets ($2.00 TOTAL) and was able to make two 6 foot long banners. So, if you have a birthday party you are planning for coming up, or do birthday pictures, cake smashes, really anything that could use a little pennant banner touch… Keep reading.

What you need:

1. Open stock paper. Like I said, I bought 8 sheets of Michael’s 12″ by 12″ paper. It was with all the scrapbooking stuff and took up a whole side of the isle because there are THAT MANY colors and designs. If you are planning to hang the banners up against the wall you can go for really any of them, double or single sided. If you are hanging it from the ceiling or out in the open, you should stick to the double sided sheets.

2. Scissors.

3. Pencil or pen. Pencil is safer, no ink blotches. Learned that lesson.

4. Hole puncher. These are also at Michael’s, I have the super cheap one. I think it is normally $4, but they always have a 40% off digital coupon on their website you can to drop that even more;)

5. Ribbon or string.

6. Tape (optional).

7. A ruler.

I like to do my pennants 5″ x 7″ and I can get 4 out of each sheet at that size. So I line my ruler (well, my tape measure because we don’t have an actual ruler) with the corner of the sheet and across the top put a little mark at 2.5″, 5″, 7.5″ and at 10″. That measures out the length of two pennants and their centers. Next I measure down the page and make a mark at 7″… Not going to go too far in depth here, I’m sure you get where I’m going lol. If your sheets are one sided, do the marking on the back white side, just in case.

Once the first three pennants are outlined, cut them out! To save time and sanity I will stack up two or three sheets and cut them at the same time. Then you will still have room left for one more along the side. Here I just take one of thepennant that are already cut out and trace it.

Next, hole punch the top corners of the pennants. Again, here I stack up to 4 pennants, that’s about as many sheets my dinky hole puncher can take without having a seizure.

And now it’s time to string/ribbon them together! I measure out 10 feet of ribbon, because I like the slack at the ends to tie to whatever. I’m probably going to use these in Owen’s cake smash photos, so I will need to tie them to my backdrop stand. Get them all strung on, and then I like to tape the end pennants to the ribbon. It stores a little nicer without them all sliding out of the center.

And once I got through all my pennants I ended up with 2 banners that measure out to be roughly 6 feet long, considering the overlapping corners.